Flawed Fairytales

Look, we can discuss whether or not Eggers did his job well with this one, but the combination of the script + Eggers’ comments does make me think that the intent was to show a fucked up love triangle. That doesn’t mean that people can’t be extremely, extremely horrified by it, and personally, I STILL don’t like the addition of her childhood encounter with him as opposed to the earlier drafts where it didn’t exist, specifically because I think the message got muddied. I think basically that all available interpretations of the text are valid (death of the author can apply if you don’t want to accept Robert Eggers’ comments on the film), I think we’re meant to be disquieted by it, I think we’re meant to be conflicted about it, but I do think that we have to accept that the authorial intent appears to have been to have SOME degree of a fucked up, toxic love triangle, since I don’t believe that anyone was holding a gun to Eggers’ head on the matter.

Again, I think we can discuss implementation and whether it was successful, we can discuss whether things got lost from one draft to another (I think the final cut is messy because they changed things between drafts without quite realizing what they were *doing*), we can discuss Eggers limitations and why we’re framing things a certain way, but I also don’t think the film is designed to be clear cut in that way.

Orlok/Thomas

Orlok/Thomas "THE KISS"

Not only did the woman who he thought he was intitled to 'fix' get mad at him, not only does the consequences of his actions lead to his own death, not only does he end up being rebuilt with those objectified dead women parts forcing him to go through the same sexualization as Lizzy did as well as gender dysphoria, BUT he and lizzy will probably go through crack withdrawal because of how he killed his victims.

Because sometimes I'll tell them about these incredibly bleak psychological horrors with in-depth commentary on the state of the world and society, that features absolutely gut-wrenching performances from each of its actors, and has some absolutely incredible and graphic special effects done by the best of the best.

Movie of the Day: Frankenhooker

Director/co-writer Frank Henenlotter satirizes the dating scene with this parody of Frankenstein. After his fiancee is killed in a lawn-mowing accident, a medical school dropout attempts to resurrect her by creating her a new body. But when he uses the body parts of sex workers, he unwittingly creates a nymphomaniacal monster who goes on a rampage.

It's violent and weird, but this movie is also incredibly funny. Patty Mullen is fantastically bizarre as Elizabeth Shelley, the monster of the title. She is completely committed to this strange, fun, fucked-up movie. James Lorinz is also hilariously deadpan as Jeffrey Frankenstein, honestly right up there with Jeffrey Combs as Herbert West in terms of being funny in a weird movie.